I've been looking at all my junk email lately, and trying to unsubscribe from the plethora of lists I've managed to put myself on over the years. The problem is when I was in college, I bought lots of stuff online, so now my college email account is nothing but junk mail. I used to leave that account alone for months at a time, only to check it and see that I had over 250 new messages, all of them junk mail. So now I'm hitting unsubscribe with every email that I get. What I think is a little odd is some of them give you a time frame in which you'll be taken off the list. All of these emails are generated automatically; it's not like there's someone holed up in a backroom manually typing in hundreds of email addresses. Therefore, the unsubscribe feature should also be automatic. Yet some of the sites tell me that it'll take up to a week to get me off their list. Oh, well. I'll just keep hitting the unsubscribe button and see if that reduces my junk mail. One can hope, can't one? :o)

I'm a bit saddened to say I seemed to have lost my taste for heavy metal lately. It's been the one musical constant in my life -- from time I was six years old and rocking to the Beastie Boys' "Fight for the Right to Party." My sister for a time was a headbanger, and she let me borrow all her Def Leppard and Poison and Motley Crue tapes, and I've always been a sucker for the boys from Jersey, Bon Jovi. She got into the heavier stuff, like Ozzy Osbourne, and wore tons of black with her big hair, but I tended more towards hair bands. The one exception to the rule is when I bought a tape of Metallica's black album in seventh grade and was hooked. I have all the Metallica albums released since then (I'm not sure I want to buy the older ones -- the heavy metal rock station plays "Master of Puppets" several times a day as it is). Kurt still listens to the heavy metal rock station most of the time, but I just can't seem to get into the angry man music like Papa Roach and Drowning Pool. (Of course, since the lead singer of Drowning Pool died in Manassas, Virginia, several weeks ago, I doubt they'll release anything soon.) So now I listen to classic rock, which my mother sort of makes fun of me for because it's all music older than I am. That's ok -- she really gets into big band music, and she's not quite THAT old. :o)

I was thinking one day for some reason of this photo of my father that I absolutely adore. I'm not quite sure why I like this photo so much. It was taken in May of 1975 in Virginia Beach, and my father was still a journalist first class in the US Navy. He sent me a high resolution image of the photo, and I went to Walmart yesterday for a frame for it. By the way, Dad stopped smoking not long after this photo was taken, well before I was born.